The Most Common Type Of Sleep

Normal breathing during sleep is deeper and slower, but it’s still easy and clear. As any parent knows, tiredness causes children to have explosive tempers, easily hurt feelings, and impatience. It’s a dangerous combination. With normal breathing, there are no obstructions to the flow of air through the nasal passages. It is very quiet and easy. Each breath is full and clear. Obstructed breathing, especially in adults, usually involves some kind of snoring. Snoring is noisy sleep breathing caused by the vibration of soft tissues in the nose and throat. It happens when airways are too narrow or are obstructed in some way. Even though more men snore than women, more than 30 percent of women snore too. Women also tend to underreport the prevalence and intensity of their own snoring. Although snoring is a common topic of jokes in conversations between couples, it is not a laughing matter.

A Haunted Heart

The vibration from snoring can damage the carotid arteries, which are the major blood vessels that deliver blood to your brain. This may increase the risk of stroke. In a study of heavy snorers, the prevalence of carotid atherosclerosis was 64 percent, compared to 20 percent in mild snorers. Additionally, if snoring is not addressed and worsens, it can be a significant risk factor for developing sleep apnea, which is a very serious medical condition. Retraining your daytime breathing can be helpful for your nighttime breathing too. Nobody should snore, but that’s especially true for children, so please seek treatment if you notice your kids snoring. Again, airway and sleep disorders can have a profound impact on the growth and development of a child. In fact, they are usually so exhausted, falling asleep is rarely a problem. But as soon as the muscles and tissues of the face, neck, and mouth start to relax, the trouble begins. Those tissues block the airway and the body panics. Each time the lungs try to expand and can’t, the body releases adrenaline, in an attempt to jolt itself awake. Eventually, the person does fall asleep again, only to have the whole exhausting cycle repeat, sometimes many times every hour.

Hard To Believe

To make matters worse, patients suffering from sleep apnea subconsciously avoid going to sleep because sleep is extremely unpleasant for them. They often gravitate to the couch or lounger in front of the television, where they can sleep much more comfortably, since their airway stays open more easily in a seated upright position. Once they get up to go to bed, the oxygen deprivation/adrenaline/jolting awake cycle continues. People with sleep apnea tend to feel very tired all the time because they never manage to get through the deeper stages of sleep that are so critical for brain and body repair. The typical diagnostic criteria for sleep apnea is that the patient experiences no breathing for at least 10 seconds during sleep, five or more times per hour. For some people, it happens much more often than that, and their sleep is disrupted hundreds of times every single night. In addition to being exhausting, sleep apnea can cause a drop in the level of oxygen in the blood. To give you a sense of the severity of oxygen deprivation, even with moderate sleep apnea, patients will often have their blood oxygen drop from around 98 to 100 percent to 80, 70, or even into the 50 percent range.24 For context, if your blood oxygen drops to 92 percent in a hospital, they will put an oxygen mask on you. When conscious, it is almost impossible to get your blood oxygen to drop to 90 percent by holding your breath. When oxygen levels dip this low, it can have harmful effects on the cardiovascular system and the brain. People with sleep apnea may have memory and concentration difficulties and be less productive throughout the day.

Sometimes The Good Guys Finish First

They may be more prone to work injuries and driving accidents. This is the most common type of sleep apnea. This type is less frequently diagnosed and can occur without snoring. It is caused by the interruption of signals from the central nervous system to breathing muscles. He has a relatively small mouth, some crooked teeth, and an overbite. He also snores loudly at night and sleeps with his mouth open. His parents have a hard time waking him for school, which he hates attending. His teacher calls a meeting with his parents because, in addition to his poor performance and trouble paying attention, he has started picking fights with other students. The kid happens to have a dentist appointment coming up, and the parents decide to ask about the crooked teeth. The dentist tells them it’s fine because all kids have crooked teeth these days, and they should just wait until all the permanent teeth come in and see what happens. Maybe he’ll grow out of it, and if not, they’ll just pull some teeth to make room for the rest. The family’s insurance won’t pay for braces until the child is 12 years old anyway. The truth is that this imaginary boy is based on one of my patients. His parents finally brought him in to see me for a second opinion. Together, we decided to use a combination of an expander on the upper jaw to create more space for his teeth and airway, and a functional device to help grow his lower jaw forward. This second device fixed his overbite and gave his tongue more room. Then he completed a series of tongue, breathing, and swallowing exercises to retrain his tongue posture and to learn how to breathe through his nose. All of these changes helped him to sleep better, which, in turn, improved his behavior, attention, and school performance. He is strong, happy, and enjoying his life now. And he didn’t spend his childhood years taking medication. For young children, the connections between breathing, sleeping, behavior, growth, and development are clear, if you know to look for them. How well a child develops and learns depends so heavily on having a consistent, healthy amount of oxygen in the brain.